Excel/Cell Reference in Excel application.

Cell Reference is intersection of column,row where data is to be inserted in the cell.

For example : A3 Cell data is 5.
Now A3 cell is column 1 and row 3.

Instead of addressing a cell as columnrow i.e. A3 would we had use
addressing a cell as rowcolumn, it would have become 3A.

In this case, the cell reference is 3A, now if this convention had
been applied instead of the columnrow convention for cell representation, would it had impacted other excel features ?.

Examples : 5C, 4B, 9R instead of C5,B4,R9 respectively.

Awaiting your reply,

Thanks & Regards,
Prashant S Akerkar

ANSWER: I don't understand the reasoning behind the question - excel has two methods of referring to cells - the A3 reference style, and the R1C1 reference style, where both rows and columns are referred to by number, and in formulas this can mean relative to current position. Excel does not have the option of swapping letter and number around, so the question doesn't arise?

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QUESTION: Dear Aidan

Thank you.

As you mention,

A. Excel does not have the option of swapping letter and number around.
B. Excel has two methods of referring to cells - the A3 reference style, and the R1C1 reference style, where both rows and columns are referred to by number, and in formulas this can mean relative to current position.

Regarding to your answer, Had Excel used the option of swapping letter and number, by doing this, could this have impacted excel features and if yes
which features would had been impacted ?

Example :

E3=7
R3C5=7
E3=R3C5

if i write 3E instead of using E3 and R3C5 cell references
saying 3E=7

Is 3E=E3 ?
3E=R3C5 ?

Awaiting your reply,

Thanks & Regards,
Prashant S Akerkar

ANSWER: IF excel was completely rewritten, then all microsofts source code would need to be re-written as far as I know - no functions would work UNLESS they knew how to use the new reference format - so basically, excel would not function at all - but as Microsoft would have to make this change, they would know the impact of doing it.

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QUESTION: Dear Aidan

Thank you.

As Excel is not allowing us to use 1A,5B,7R conventions for a cell reference, if we tried
using this cell referencing, it results in formulas or functions not accepting this cell reference.

To make this happen that Excel also accepts 1A,2B,5C cell references then one has to modify the
source code of the latest version of excel. By doing this the current features should continue working
as it was before.

Mostly the Source code of MS Excel application was written in C or C++ programming languages.

Thank you for your help.

Thanks & Regards,
Prashant S Akerkar

AnswerYou have summed it up fairly well - I would imagine that excel was written in C of some variety, but I don't work for Microsoft so don't know - any application interfacing with excel will need to do so via the currently used methods of cell reference.

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